thanks alot every1 for your inputs, makes the decision making quite easy.
I will stick with gw2, but will dedicate a weekend and try out Rift. Any recomendations which class to start with? i always end up playing casters. And any advice on which server to join? Would prefer an active populated server.

Thanks all once again

Make one of each class? Though if you like casters you'll likely gravitate towards the mage archetype. All the servers seem kinda busy to me. Might want to specify if you want some recs for NA v. EU, pvp/pve/rp etc.

To answer your original post...I'm playing both games right now and switch on and off between them. When I go to Rift, I miss my dodge key from GW2. Love GW2, but I mostly play Rift when I find myself missing WoW, lol. Rift feels like it's got the complexity of WoW's TBC and the quality of life benefits of Wrath. Dunno, that's how it feels like in game for me...it's probably why I have a soft spot for Rift, haha.

In GW2, the way classes are done, along with other systems in that game, basically let you never have to group up with someone, or have any sort of team work. The game is almost like two trains side by side on two parallel tracks: you never have a need to party up, even the dungeons aren't mandatory as Best-In-Slot items are easily found outside them. It's a very antisocial MMO, because it puts players together, but never gives you a reason to actually work with them, other than the token "throwing this banner down on my Warrior."

My sister describes the same phenomenon quoted as, "Soloing next to each other."

Any recomendations which class to start with? i always end up playing casters. And any advice on which server to join? Would prefer an active populated server.

Due to the way the soul trees work, you can basically play any class the way you like. Not all are optimal endgame, but for leveling, you can play pretty much an infinite number of ways. If you like casters, well, every class has a caster tree, even warrior(you wear plate, use the same str based gear as melee warriors, but...you cast shocks, ball lightning, chain lightning, channeled lightning, lighting from the sky, etc with the same range as any other caster). Mages are the classic caster class, but Tempest warriors, Tactician rogues, Inquisitor clerics...all work.

Hi all.
I am thinking of trying out Rift, i basically dont know anything about the game. I do play GW2 occasionally after quitting wow, since i find the graphics and lvling process to be extremely fun. Hence the topic of this thread, how would you people who have tried both games compare the 2?
Graphics, gameplay etc and is the game too hardcore for new people joining in now much late since the games been on for a while?

Any inputs here for a potential rift player, appreciated.

I'm sorry but the graphics are fun? Rift is boring for the most part from my experience. When you first level it's identical to most other MMO's. Endgame everything is cool at first but gets boring at first I loved the daily Rifts and after a while it was just boring now that it's F2P you might as well check it out.

mmos in general seem "anti social" nowadays. I can't think of a game in the past 6 years in which conversation has been more than "hello" or "heal me"

The heroic dungeons in Cataclysm were reasonably difficult and required some coaching/coordination but success rate and queue times were sacrificed. It's hard to have a middle ground between needs vent and gogogo.

I have recently returned to rift after gw2, when I originally played Rift I only stayed till level 20 due to missing the guild I was in within wow. Now wow is far behind me with no regrets due to utter boredom of the dailies. I enjoyed GW2, but found that although the events were spontaneously activated, knowing where they would happen meant they felt more like questing. I have returned to Rift because I did enjoy the events there more than any other game i have tried. They are truly spontaneous and can proc almost anywhere (or at least it feels that way), I also enjoy the way they escalate it can become very immersive.

So I can talk as some one that has come from a similar back ground, is newly returned and still leveling. I realise my perspective will no doubt change or develop at cap, but I felt it might still be useful.

What I am enjoying along side the live events...

The wardrobe and some of the gear designs, I am enjoying the more traditional feel to the gear and love having a cosmetic set i can actually fight in.

The trinity... as much i liked being so independent in gw2 I confess i missed the trinity and as some here have mentioned the team work that inspired, in rift they approach the trinity differently in that you can add in a support class and that every calling (class) appears to have a healer or support class option. So you can simply swap to that role if you need to heal/support the group.

The class builds... or souls. I really am enjoying having less pressure to form cookie cutter builds and simply having so much versatility. RIFT has now added some standard builds to help new players but I recommend not staying on them too long and playing about. In the same way gw2 introduced the element of each different weapon transforming your play style RIFT allows you to do this via souls, and it really delivers this on a grand scale. You can really have one calling (class) and play it in so many different ways that you may forget you can have more than one character!

I have tried the adventures and found them more enjoyable than questing solo, its a really nice touch to have a random questing group, but i can also see how you could end up like a sheep simply following the leader... but then many raids have felt like that in the past so nothing new lol

Dimensions... I love them, I guess this is like marmite but I missed this sort of content, which i enjoyed in LOTRO, and think its been done in such an interesting way within RIFT. I like that you can either simply buy buildings/items or build them from materials (very proud of my built from scratch waterwheel)

If your a role player dimensions are like rp gold and many rp guilds have build small towns and scenes which they can then either open to the public or keep to themselves.

Things I haven't been so keen on...

I miss being able to have unlimited use of a dye once i buy it as well as having a wider choice.

I agree that some of the animations feel slightly unnatural and uninspired. this does seem to vary by race and calling though so play around with different ones. For example to me the female elf runs really weirdly, but the humans and dwarves are fine. The Cleric weapon animations are very dull to me, but the rogue ones are fun.

I miss having one really busy city, but the shard (server) I am on is only medium so I am planning to try a high population shard.

The 'Tell' (or whisper) system annoys me as I find it hard to tab between conversations, I suspect there is a mod i can get to help with this.

Overall I would say if your a looking for a game to fill the void until the next big thing its definitely worth trying RIFT.

At level cap there is one "really busy city". It's called Tempest Bay and it is shared by Guardians and Defiants. Meridian and Sanctum are sorta like your early level home base/hub. But in terms of hanging around, Tempest Bay is where every one is at generally speaking.

mmos in general seem "anti social" nowadays. I can't think of a game in the past 6 years in which conversation has been more than "hello" or "heal me"

I think that's just you, I've been known to chat up guild mates in any game I play, even post-f2p Rift. Granted we're not talking about the content we're doing but we are talking.
A "Yeah what do you think of Yeezus??" conversation is a lot preferable to a wannabe Sergeant barking orders at the group.

EDIT: to the person talking about the dyes having a small range of colors: alchemists can craft colors which you can't buy in the Rift store.

Well I'm level 29 with a day and change played. My preliminary impression is that if you are a fan of nostalgic WoW - vanilla/BC - then Rift might be a good fit. I for one am, and so far I'm finding the experience to be pretty great. A lot more enjoyable, and addicting, than GW2.

The questing feels a lot more familiar to vanilla WoW or BC, by which I mean you go out and kill a bunch of mobs. No getting on shredders and chopping down 50 trees, no getting on flying machines and dropping bombs, no building disguises and infiltrating camps. Just killing stuff. It's the kind of questing I like, and miss. And like old times, you get a decent chunk of quests at a time, not 1 or 2 or 3 at most like now. The layout and flow is closer to Wrath though, so it's kind of the best of both worlds.

There's also great grouping options. First of all at level 10 you can queue for instant adventures, which are cool. They're kinda like scenarios, they're instant-pop and have sorta scripted objectives, they're out in the game world and there's no real limit on group size, so you can have a raid of 20 or a party of 5, depending. At 15 you get to queue for dungeons, just like WoW - literally, the LFG system is exactly the same, right down to using the same keybind (i). Another thing is rifts, which are like dynamic events in GW2.

Generally you're going to want to take advantage of all of these, because the leveling curve is only slightly more forgiving than vanilla WoW. Just doing all the quests in a zone may not be enough to get you to the next without doing some rifts, a dungeon or few, and (not necessarily or) some instant adventures. All of this is completely okay with me, because I love leveling! Again, if you're a fan of classic WoW, Rift could be a good fit.

One issue I have with the game is performance. The graphics are stunningly beautiful. But it puts a ton of stress on my video card. Warms it up to 83 deg C after a few hours on medium settings. I've read that optimizations are in the works.

OH one other thing I want to say. Almost right away I realized I had been making excuses and apologies for Blizzard for a long time. Rift has tons and tons of mounts and gear sets, cosmetic and otherwise, that all look highly detailed and fantastic and frankly better than a lot of what WoW has on offer. Plus the environments are huge, detailed and beautiful, as are the dungeons. It was a bit of a wakeup call. (Not to mention Celestial Steed equivalent mounts and FULL cosmetic SETS, in a FREE TO PLAY game, cost between $5 and $10 in the in-game store.)

PS: On the same day I unsubbed from WoW, I dropped $50 on Rift for 8500 credits. I think the whole idea of making it free and allowing you to customize what functionality you want to unlock is really cool. Do I want to unlock more bag slots? More character slots? Buy leveling gear? Save those credits to rename my toons in the future? (As far as I know I won't be able to use those credits to buy BiS items at level cap (P2W).) In any case, as far as I'm concerned I "bought" the game, and Trion has bought a ton of good will with me for trusting me to play their game for free, confident enough in their product to believe I'd likely support them with my money. It's easy to see why this model is so successful for so many games. I will likely be supporting Trion with even more of my dollars in the future.

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Oh another cool thing is if you get in now, there's a kind of 'new again' buzz now that it's F2P. Remember when WoW used to come up with new servers, and there was that new server feel, with lots of well-populated zones with people leveling? And GW2, at least when I leveled it, not sure if it's still like that. Anyway, if you get in on it now, there's going to be plenty of people for zone events, instant adventures, and just people you run into, without gimmicks like CRZ.

Just to give you an example, there was a recent zone invasion in Scarlet Gorge, which is a 27-29 zone that's like Badlands meets the Grand Canyon, the climactic event of which featured a dragon that took a legitimate raid to take down. Sure enough, there were enough players in the zone, of the appropriate level, to form a roughly 20 person raid to take the sumbitch down - without the benefit of CRZ. (Another nifty feature is that when these public events are going on you can elect to automatically join a "public group", which helps a lot for heals and the like.)

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Originally Posted by Kaidog

thanks alot every1 for your inputs, makes the decision making quite easy.
I will stick with gw2, but will dedicate a weekend and try out Rift. Any recomendations which class to start with? i always end up playing casters. And any advice on which server to join? Would prefer an active populated server.

Thanks all once again

The first 8 levels of quests are linear and mission oriented, and didn't keep my attention at first. I got to level 5 and didn't come back for a while. Then I decided to give it a sincere shot. I wasn't quite enthralled, just stuck it out until level 10 for instant adventures, 15 for dungeons.

Level 20 is where things really took off. Playing Guardians, level 20 took me to Gloamwood, which is kinda like Duskwood, but a lot more epic, in a way that you really have to experience to appreciate. From that point I've been really engrossed. Everything about the world of Rift is epic, it's a much bigger world than Azeroth or GW2's world. Also, important to me, like WoW and unlike GW2, it's a seamless world; no walled off zones with portals or loading between zones. It's one big world with pretty breathtaking sights. It's a world you WANT to explore, by which I mean the more you see, the more you want to see, the more you wonder what's around the corner. The more I play, the more excited I get about this game.

All this to say, when you do sit down and play it, I urge you to really sit down and play it. Give it a real honest try. It might be slow to take off, but if you're like me, once it does it's magic.

Just to give you an example, there was a recent zone invasion in Scarlet Gorge, which is a 27-29 zone that's like Badlands meets the Grand Canyon, the climactic event of which featured a dragon that took a legitimate raid to take down. Sure enough, there were enough players in the zone, of the appropriate level, to form a roughly 20 person raid to take the sumbitch down - without the benefit of CRZ. (Another nifty feature is that when these public events are going on you can elect to automatically join a "public group", which helps a lot for heals and the like.)

These can be...inconvenient sometimes, too. I was in Shimmersand last night, when a mass invasion happened in the quest hub I was working on. Lvl 50 elites EVERYWHERE, which were a bit too much for my lvl 44 rogue to take down. There was like 3 other people in the area and one was lvl 29 not mentored or anything(not sure why he was there at all, the zone was a lvl 40+). Basically prohibited me from doing anything in the area for awhile...finally a lvl 53 showed up, and the 2 of us together managed to retake the town by stalking the outskirts, pulling 1 or 2 mobs, dispatching them, then moving in further and further in. It was fun, but man it took awhile, and prior to him showing up, it drastically limited my ability to quest in the area.

(...) Sure enough, there were enough players in the zone, of the appropriate level, to form a roughly 20 person raid to take the sumbitch down - without the benefit of CRZ. (...)

Actually, Rift does have the ability to join other servers. It's not like in WoW where it chucks you in with other server's players automatically, but you can invite people from other servers (for example Bunnyhops@Argent) and they can do zone events with you. Similarly, you can also join other server channels (for instance /join Level 40-49@Faeblight) and you will get alerts of zone events in that respective level range on that server. You can then ask in the channel for an invitation and you can join in on their invasion. I think it's pretty neat as it brings the community together.

Anyway I agree with most things you said, especially the Vanilla/TBC feeling of Rift. That's exactly my impression and I love it. It's not only about game design though, the community feels a lot like Burning Crusade too.

P.S. As for invasions being annoying, remember to use your Ascended abilities, including the flare that summons a friendly NPC to help out. It gives you the ability to solo massive groups of invading mobs. Use them!

These can be...inconvenient sometimes, too. I was in Shimmersand last night, when a mass invasion happened in the quest hub I was working on. Lvl 50 elites EVERYWHERE, which were a bit too much for my lvl 44 rogue to take down. There was like 3 other people in the area and one was lvl 29 not mentored or anything(not sure why he was there at all, the zone was a lvl 40+). Basically prohibited me from doing anything in the area for awhile...finally a lvl 53 showed up, and the 2 of us together managed to retake the town by stalking the outskirts, pulling 1 or 2 mobs, dispatching them, then moving in further and further in. It was fun, but man it took awhile, and prior to him showing up, it drastically limited my ability to quest in the area.

Yeah, the aforementioned invasion I was talking about, there were like 50 mobs clustered around the quest hub where I had some quests to turn in. Was trying to split pull a few at a time but it wasn't working out, so figured I'd just wait for them to despawn, but luckily a high level (60 I think) friendly came and took them out - probably someone whose alt was having the same problem as me and relogged on their high level toon I'm guessing. Thanks emni for the tip on Ascended abilities, that probably would have been helpful, will remember next time!

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Originally Posted by Doozerjun

mmos in general seem "anti social" nowadays. I can't think of a game in the past 6 years in which conversation has been more than "hello" or "heal me"

Well it is what you make of it. To Rift's credit, it is the most group-friendly MMO I've played. It does everything it can to facilitate groups, and nothing at all to discourage collaboration. Some, but not all, points in its favor:

1. Tags are always shared so you can choose to collaborate on quests, with or without party
2. Instant adventures are a unique and instant way to do group content, no rigid group size or role formula, available at level 10
3. Rifts are another unique way to do group content, similar to GW2's Dynamic Events
4. Whenever you're in the vicinity of a rift, adventure, invasion or any public group event you can elect to join that group
5. Likewise, whenever you're in the vicinity of a rift, etc. you can participate in that event's objectives
6. From what I can tell, you can do quests even in a raid group
7. Chat channels are global (broken down by level range), I think it's even cross-faction

So again, my point is just that the social aspect of MMOs is largely what you make of it, but Rift really goes out of its way to facilitate grouping and collaborative play compared to other MMOs I've played.

P.S. As for invasions being annoying, remember to use your Ascended abilities, including the flare that summons a friendly NPC to help out. It gives you the ability to solo massive groups of invading mobs. Use them!

RIFT is a wonderful game, but with bad engine.
Using video settings on max, even with a powerful computer, u will suffer moments of low fps, especially when many players are on the screen.
Even in the cities, you'll have problems with low fps.
I loved the game, but the constant decline in the number of players made ​​me go back to wow, where the community is MUCH larger.

the constant decline in the number of players made ​​me go back to wow, where the community is MUCH larger.

Nice try, the fact that they added more servers, had to split the clusters into two separate ones for both NA and EU and that all servers are High population nearly all the time has no bearing of course.

RIFT is a wonderful game, but with bad engine.
Using video settings on max, even with a powerful computer, u will suffer moments of low fps, especially when many players are on the screen.
Even in the cities, you'll have problems with low fps.

This is what ultimately made me leave after coming back for the expansion -- the game just didn't play sufficiently smoothly on my machine. Moving, or even panning the camera, especially in areas with overhead structure (that cave hub in the desert over by the Defiant zone is a good example) just didn't work very well.

One of WoW's unsung advantages is how smooth the client feels. Judging by how other companies don't measure up, Blizzard must have invested a lot of resources in their engine.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.